Rejoice (!?)
a sermon for Joy Sunday
Good morning, Blue Roomies!
The question of the hour: is the book done? No, but it’s close… soooooo close, which also feels far away. But we’re getting there!
In the meantime, this coming Sunday is Joy Sunday for churches that observe the season of Advent, but for various reasons, we switched the themes of the second and third weeks, so last Sunday was Joy at Trinity. Here’s the sermon I preached, both text and audio (which differ slightly).
And an encore sharing of 2023’s Toolkit for Holiday Joy, with a couple of updates and new links. En-Joy.
MaryAnn McKibben Dana
December 8, 2024
Trinity Presbyterian Church
Philippians 4:1-7
Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved. 2 I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. 3 Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my coworkers, whose names are in the book of life.
4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 5 Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
We here at Trinity have gone rogue this week… in two ways!
I’ll get to the second one in a minute, but the first is that we changed the order of the Advent candles. The second Sunday is supposed to be Peace Sunday, but we moved Peace to next Sunday, when we’ll be led in worship by our musicians, because peace fit the theme of the cantata better. Which means today is Joy. It’s a logistical change driven by the timing of that service, but I like it because honestly, I don’t want to wait on joy. I want to immerse in joy now. To paraphrase the Christmas song from the musical Mame, I think “we need a little joy, right this very minute.”
Contentment is all well and good. Happiness can come and go. But joy… joy is accessible to us right in the middle of the most abject sorrow we can imagine. Joy is visible in a child’s bubbly excitement at the coming of Christmas, or a room full of loved ones celebrating a retirement. It’s audible in the spontaneous laughter at the funeral, remembering a precious memory of the departed. Joy is tangible in the phone call that arrives just when it’s needed most. Or the hug, or the casserole, or the check to help cover rent. Joy is one of the most powerful forces there is. It keeps people alive in the most brutal places on earth; it fuels social movements. I was reading this week about the nation of Chile and the end of the brutal Pinochet regime in the 1980s. As his support began to wane, the opportunity arose for a public vote on whether Pinochet would remain in power. He began cracking down on dissent, but a coalition of religious leaders, unions, and others banded together for a massive rally. But a specific kind of event. They called it the March for Joy…
scheduled for days before the election, and the opposition’s positive ads featured optimistic slogans such as ‘Joy is coming’ and “Happiness is a rainbow” (the rainbow was the symbol of the opposition to Pinochet). Television ads that featured soccer stars and ordinary people expressing hope for Chile’s future were a sensation.
By contrast, Pinochet’s ads, instead, repeated his old talking points about the threat from leftists and harped on grievance and loss, with grisly and frightening images to cow the opposition.
As it became clear that the democratic opposition was winning over the populace, the regime redoubled its terror tactics. The offices of the opposition campaign were firebombed, volunteers were beaten, rallies were forcibly dissolved, and thousands were arrested. And yet the people persisted, and they persisted in joy.1
And joy prevailed. And a tyrant was brought down.
If you, like me, are looking around and feeling burdened with how not-as-it-should-be the world is right now, how weak joy seems to be in the face of violence and hate, that’s not a sign to give up on joy, but to double down on it. Joy is urgent at the moment… a joy that has no idea how this is all going to turn out in the short term, but that clings to the belief beyond belief, the hope beyond all hope, that God is not finished with this earthly project, that we’re waiting in this season, not just for candles and Silent Night, but for God to arrive again in the flesh. In your flesh and mine, and in the flesh of people we don’t know and people we can’t stand, to make things good and beautiful and just. I’ll light a candle to that.
Which brings me to the second way we’ve gone rogue this week. Some of you know that unless we’re in a worship series, we follow a schedule of readings, called the lectionary, that thousands of mainline Protestant churches use. Which means that if you were to show up at another church on Joy Sunday, you’d hear this passage from Philippians… only not exactly. You’d only hear a portion of what we heard. The easy part. The part that begins “Rejoice in the Lord…”
But we need the other part, the part about two people in that church in Philippi, the women who aren’t getting along, Euodia and Synteche… and apparently the conflict is disruptive enough that it needs to be addressed in a letter to the entire church. Paul begins and ends this section with rejoice, but in the middle, splat, there’s this conflict.
And isn’t that the way?
Because it’s easy to be joyful without those verses.
When glossing over things that aren’t going well.
When in denial about the hard work we still have to do.
But no, Paul says, “Rejoice. Rejoice. Rejoice. Oh and figure out this mess, for the love of God.”
On the one hand, it’s good news. We don’t need to postpone joy until the conditions are perfect.
On the other hand, there it is, right out in the open… and it needs to be dealt with.
How do we do this work, when too much has been said by both sides, things that can’t be taken back? When the conflict between the two Philippian church leaders, the two family members, the two polarized factions, has left this gaping trench in the earth that’s just too deep and jagged to cross?
How do we figure this out when we’re sitting on one edge of that trench and we don’t want to cross it, when we’ll take harmony and mutual understanding as long as it’s on our side of the trench?
One clue is this business about the loyal companion, this Syzygus, who is called upon to help the women achieve harmony. The word companion literally means one who is yoked, one who is harnessed to another to get the job done. Paul says, I ask you as one who is yoked to help them… They have worked together, they have struggled together. Remind them that they are yoked to one another, like it or not.
The problem is, if we’re honest we’ll admit that we really don’t like it. Maybe we don’t mind being yoked to Christ, but if being in the Lord means being yoked to someone with whom we disagree—well, we’re going to grit our teeth over that. We’re going to want to throw the yoke off at that point and find people of like mind to work with.
But the text won’t let us do that.
Over time the Greek word for companion, or yoked one, has given us the delightful English word, syzygy. A syzygy involves three celestial bodies, planets, moons, whatever, all within a common gravitational system. They’re yoked together, but by something unseen, something powerful, something that can’t be shrugged off. It’s part of who you are and where you are. That’s how we’re connected to one another in the Lord—not by choice, not by agreement, unfortunately, but by being part of this complex dance of movement and attraction, with Christ at the center. We can’t choose it, we can’t control it. We can’t pull ourselves out of it. “Can the earth say to the sun, I have no need of you?” to paraphrase another letter from Paul.
Paul invites the feuding church leaders, and the whole church, to be of the same mind “in the Lord.” Which probably doesn’t mean agreement. But to recognize that like it or not, we are yoked to one another. Sometimes those yoked bodies are far apart from one another. And you know, sometimes we need a break from the rancor or the relationship. But whether we’re all in the same household or members of the same congregation or citizens of a fractured and cranky nation, our fates are bound up with one another. I’m sorry, I wish I had better news for you.
And yet still, we’re invited into joy.
After this quick aside about the Euodia and Synteche business, Paul gets back to the joy stuff. Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I will say rejoice. Interestingly, the Greek word for rejoice can also mean good-bye or farewell. At our Wednesday Bible study, we spent some time thinking about what rejoice and goodbye have in common.
They both seem to require us to let go. When we’re experiencing joy, we’ve let go of propriety and inhibition. When we say goodbye, we let go of something or someone that’s dear to us. And so I wonder… if there’s a conflict or despair that’s gripping us today, if we feel frozen to move forward, then maybe we are holding on too tightly to something. What that something is, I can’t say for you. But in order to rejoice, we may need to loosen our grip. Last week, Stephen invited us to look up, to train our gaze on Jesus’ coming, Jesus’ advent, all around us. Perhaps the posture this week is to open our hands, to let go, so that joy can flood in. “Not to worry about anything,” as Paul says in the next line, “but in everything in prayer let your requests be made known to God.”
In a moment, we’ll come to this table of fellowship for commuion. As we prepare for this meal, I invite you to look up—and look around! Take a look at the people around you. The people you love dearly, the friends you don’t yet know, and yes, the folks who believe and think and do things that vex you to no end.
And now I invite you to hold out your hands and squeeze your fingers into a fist. What are you clutching so tightly?
Now slowly open your fingers, and feel the relief. You’ve been holding on for dear life. So let go for dear life. Now, now, we are ready to eat together, expectant and hopeful for a bit of joy.
Thanks for this brilliant explanation of joy and its relevance in this dark time. It's just what I need.
I’m a little late listening to this one, but it landed when it was supposed to in my life - thank you! In the audio, you said a benediction that’s not in the transcript. It was profound & Id love to add it to my daily practice. Will you share it?